Election report…..

A few months ago there was a lot of coverage about the "betriebsrat" or works council process at SAP. I wrote about it, as did most of the German newspapers. There was some nonsense written, especially in the foreign press and in the blogsphere about SAP being unionised…

The elections took place this week.

The irksome thing for most employees is that they were asked to vote in a election for a council that they don't want..

There was no violence (however, being Germany, they may have been some pushing in the queues to vote) , no evidence of fraud, and there was no recount, no problems with chad.

and so far, no need for any multi-coloured coalitions.

65% of the people eligible to vote did. I'm not sure what the other 35% were doing, hopefully they were too busy writing code, not watching the football. Here is the formal announcement

There has been quite a bit of reporting on the election today and yesterday, mainly in the German press. The vast majority of the elected council are anti-union, and the union types only got a couple of people on the council. (3)

I missed the Napoleon Dynamite candidate. (Actually, come to think about it, a lot of developers do look like and dress like him, and having been to some parties here, I can vouch that the dancing styles are remarkably similar…)

I'm not sure what difference it will make to the state of affairs here in the asparagus fields. The real winners of the election were probably the local tee-shirt company and the brochure printers. So, we now have a works council just like almost every other German company with more than one employee, a filing cabinet and a stamp.

I'm not sure that IT analysts should be the ones commenting on the significance of works councils. Line 56 then tries to make even more out of it.

My view: SAP's management and employees have a better grasp of the dynamics of globalisation than they are given credit for. The election results illustrate clearly that the vast majority of SAP's German employees understand that globalisation is part of SAP's strength and not something to be afraid of.

The German press coverage is better at explaining the implications of the results.

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2 thoughts on “Election report…..”

The result of that election does not say anything about the will of being powerful if SAP-Germany and specially its employees are concerned by an economical crisis.
The German Law of codetermination is such complicated that an unexperienced works´ council better should be coached by a trade-union.

Hence we will have to consider the further development of the achievements and challenges to which the SAP works´ council will be exposed.